A kitten’s pause to reflect. [I has weblog!]

I recently did a small blurb on Picross DS. I’m absolutely in love with that puzzle style. I was pleasantly delighted when my research into sudoku games on the Nintendo DS led me to discover the picture logic puzzles inside Essential Sudoku. Even with all those puzzles, however, I still wanted more. My initial search lead me to try and discover more DS games and I was able to find three of them, Puzzle Series Vol. 6 - Illust Logic, DS Puzzler Numplay Fan Oekaki, and Oekaki Puzzle Battle! - Yuusha-Oh GaoGaiGar Hen. Overall, picture logic puzzle games are all high quality and don’t seem to suffer from the overpopulation and eagerness to hop on a money bandwagon as has happened to sudoku. These 3 games are safe buys if you’re a fan of picture logic puzzles.

Illust logic sports a more stylish interface than Picross DS and is also more ‘clean.’ It’s style is much the same as the the sudoku puzzle series games and Sudoku Gridmaster. The actual gameplay screen is much better in design than Picross’. The top screen gives you your playtime and the column clues, and the bottom screen is your play area and row clues. There is no cumbersome scrolling as there is in Picross DS either. Unfortunately, I don’t know just how many puzzles there are in this title, an educated guess would put me at saying there’s at least 200 puzzles. It also seems to sport an unlockable ranking test similar to that found in Sudoku Gridmaster and the Puzzle Series sudoku games.

DS Puzzler Numplay Fan Oekaki contains both sudoku and ‘Oekaki’ logic puzzles. One of the neat things about this is that it plays in book mode, where you hold the DS sideways. It has options for right or left handed people, and a lot of options I honestly don’t understand. For english players this title might be a bit frustrating as it took me quite a bit of poking around to actually find the puzzles. Also, the type of picture logic puzzles are slightly different then previously mentioned ones. There are multiple colors and the clues are color-coded to indicate the color of block to fill in, also, alternating colors do not need a blank space between them and the previous or following color. Only consecutive clues of the same color need a seperating blank. For the record, the sudoku puzzles are of high quality and worth playing.

Oekaki Puzzle Battle! - Yuusha-Oh GaoGaiGar Hen, the first alternatively themed picture logic game I’ve discovered for the Nintendo DS. It’s fun and has a number of puzzles. It also has an interesting scheme for it’s ‘larger’ more difficult and detailed puzzles. Instead of awkward zooming or squishing everything on the screen it divides larger puzzles into multiple groupings of 10×10 grids. The largest puzzle I’ve found is 16 10×10 grids amounting to a 40×40 picross puzzle. Due to the 10×10 max puzzle size, none of the puzzles are too overly difficult, but, they’re still all quite fun puzzles to solve. The main frustration in the game is that it doesn’t stop when you’ve correctly solved a puzzle and there’s no way to mark ‘x’ in a square. To check if you’re done you hit a set of kanji on the right side of the screen and it’ll check your puzzle. It locks correct answers in red and gets rid of incorrect answers. For each incorrect answer it tallies a miss and lowers your score for that puzzle.

Discovering these three games was really nice, but, these puzzles are like catnip. “I want!” comes to mind. So, I continued my search, along other avenues, searching for published books, places to play online, and how to be able to continue to find these puzzles. I never expected to find so much on this considering how rare I perceived this type of puzzle to be.

I first continued researching what has been released for consoles. I previously mentioned the two gameboy games, Mario’s Picross and Mario’s Picross 2 in another post. Joining these two is a bunch of SNES games. Mario’s Super Picross, Oekaki Logic 1 & 2, Picross NP Volume 1-8, and Ochan no Oekaki Logic. A single gameboy advance game, Hatena Satena. A gameboy game with a downloadable rom at this site, Drymouth. Unfortunately, I’m not 100% sure of the story behind this rom. If it was just homebrew, or a never published prototype. I’ve even come across mention of two arcade boards containing picture logic puzzles, Logic Pro 1 & 2. There’s also quite a number of titles on the playstation, Ochan no Oekaki Logic 1-3, Oekaki Puzzle 1-5, Numeric Paint Puzzle, Colorful Logic 1-3, Painter Logic 1 & 2, Hello Kitty illust Puzzle, and Illustration Puzzle and Slide Puzzle. I would love to have the ability to say a little about each of these. I just don’t have access to all the hardware or games.

Having felt that I’ve exhausted the console market, I next turned to trying to find computer software and online places to play. Unfortunately in this endeavor, most of the computer software I found was russian and very hard for me to read or interpret, and even more of it was of very dubious quality. However, I came out of the scuffle with bad websites and poor looking picture logic software with 3 promising candidates. Japan Picture by Sergei I. Bogomyakov, it’s a very solid looking picture logic software and comes in with only a 12.95 price. It allows you to import puzzle files pre-made, as well as making your own puzzles from computer .ico files. Next, Japan Riddles, it’s an absolutely beautiful game and has an english release. I can’t tell you much more cause the site was in russian. Lastly, Cross Image by a company called Xdyne. It looks to be a well-polished title and it includes an editor for creating your own puzzles. It has two different licensing schemes, a 19.95 personal license, and a 29.95 extended license that lets you distribute the game to your friends and family via the companies greeting card service. I’m not sure I understand entirely how it works, but, if it allows you to distribute the full game that way, it might be quite the value if you and your family all like the puzzles.

I then began to investigate places to play online, and was only able to find a few really great sites. Picture Puzzle is one, a japanese site that has tons and tons of puzzles. Apparently there’s a rating and comment system as well. Neither is all that useful to those that can’t read japanese. Griddlers.net is a site in english with over 40,000 puzzles. A great many of them are multi-color puzzles and my short evaluation of the site lead me to believe that not all of them have logical solutions and many may rely on guesswork. I could be mistaken on this as I’m not exactly an expert on these puzzles, yet. I’d love to hear about more quality sources for Picross puzzles. The ones I was able to find through google lead me to a number of sites with a small amount of puzzles and quirky theming that made me feel I should pass on mentioning them.

Kohana here again just felt like doing up another article. This time on one of my old favorites, Uncharted Waters: New Horizons. Uncharted Waters: New Horizons is a fairly unique RPG for the SNES and was also ported for the PC. The game takes place in the early 16th century in the age of exploration. Gameplay is divided into 3 different major parts: trade, exploration, and combat and assigns your main character a fame score for each category. There are 6 main characters to choose from each having their own plot along with being a trade, explorer, or combat character. The type of the character relates to which type of fame must be increased to advance the plot though you’re pretty free to do what you want and can pursue the plot at your own pace.

Earning exploration fame involves mapping out the world, making discoveries, and finding ports. Your main opposition with exploration is keeping your crew fed and having enough water. This is simple at first as ports are very common however the further you get from main civilization the less ports you’ll find. Getting trade fame simply involves investing in ports. However this requires a lot of money which is best obtained through clever trading. Profitable trading simply involves buying low and selling high which isn’t nearly as complex as in say the Patrician series. There is a tiny bit of complexity but nothing too bad as this game is more of an RPG rather than a simulation. Gaining combat fame is quite straightforward. You simply need to pick fights. You can’t do it indiscriminately however otherwise you’ll end up making everyone an enemy. Ship combat plays out in a turn based tactical style taking turns back and forth moving your fleet around, firing, and such. If you get your flag ship next to the enemy flag ship you can challenge the enemy captain to a duel. This is nice in that if you win, the battle is over and you can claim what you want, however the reverse is also true giving you a game over if you lose. Despite playing so much I never totally figured out how dueling works but it seems to be some rock, paper, scissors style card game. I generally just get the best armor and weapon I can find, pick the card with the highest value and hope the enemy doesn’t draw the card that counters mine.

I’ve found this game to be very fun and completed it many times. It’s very simple to pick up and play and light on plot so you spend most the time actually playing the game. If you go straight through the plot most characters don’t take too long to finish however especially in the combat ones unless you’re very good at it this might be a bit hard. It’s a great fun game. Unfortunately the SNES cartridge is probably a bit hard to find and the PC version isn’t quite as nice. A great site on the game can be found at http://www.unchartedwatersnewhorizons.com/ . There is also a download for the PC version but I’m not sure exactly if its freeware or “abandonware”. I checked the Koei site to see if I could get any information on it however even their archive section only lists games as far back as 1997 so it wasn’t much help.

Sudoku became a phenomenon, growing in popularity amazingly quick. Western programmers were quick to hop on the bandwagon and produced metric tons of really crap sudoku games, losing what makes the japanese puzzles so fun to solve. They took an approach where they just generated random grids and then blanked all the numbers out except for the clues to leave you with a random, chaotic puzzle that was more frustrating than fun. Early ones didn’t even guarantee one unique solution, instead you could question your reasoning and then if it was a published puzzle when you checked the solution in back you’d be bewildered as to why your answer was completely different, yet, still completely valid. Eventually, there were enough complaints about ‘proper’ puzzles that they began to at least give symmetrical masking of the numbers which is a characteristic of the original handcrafted japanese puzzles. Yet, still, these are completely randomly generated and are hard to follow and solve compared to handwritten puzzles. As of yet, there are no program to my knowledge that generate a sudoku puzzle that contains all the characteristics of a handwritten puzzle. It’s often quite easy to determine a randomized computer generated puzzle from a handwritten one. So, even knowing all of that, I was enticed by the chances of there being a quality sudoku game on the DS, I mean, they have to pay outrageous licensing fees just to release a game, so surely they would do it right? Well… Unfortunately, this kitten doesn’t know everything.

So, during my exploits, I’ve disovered the following list of Nintendo DS games containing sudoku puzzles.

Brain age has the singular honor of having the highest quality of sudoku puzzles for a DS release. The handwriting recognition is wonderful, allowing a full 9 digit notation; it’s spectacular. The bad news, only 56 puzzles per difficulty, and at least 8 of those are tutorials. I haven’t unlocked the hard puzzles, so don’t know what the exact number or type of puzzles there are in that mode, just guessing based on the number of easy and intermediate puzzles. Also of note, the japanese version of this game does not contain the sudoku puzzles.

Puzzle Series Vol. 3 - Sudoku, is a japanese released Sudoku puzzle game. Localised later as Sudoku Gridmaster for US release and Sudoku Master for European release. It has a number of good features for Sudoku software, most notably the highlighting of the current row and column you’re on. As well a system to notate possible choices for a particular square. Also, the game does not give away solutions when you fill in a wrong number. This is important because when the software does assist a user it really takes the effort out of solving sudoku puzzles. The game provides 70 easy puzzles, 140 medium puzzles, and 90 hard puzzles. The interface is simple enough that a little bit of trial and error will get you to the puzzles even if you don’t know any japanese at all. There’s also a fourth option on the difficulty screen that I presume hides some unlockables. I don’t know if these unlockables are extra puzzles or not. The good news is that it appears to me that these puzzles are hand-written and not computer generated. The bad news is that there’s only 300 puzzles. It’s enough to keep one occupied for a while, but, once you finish the puzzles, you basically paid 20$+ for 300 puzzles, which, isn’t a very good rate considering the number of puzzles provided in various magazines and books. You can get 500+ handwritten sudoku puzzles for around 7$ US. It’s not a game I’d buy unless I found it in a bargain bin for less then 10$.

Sudoku Mania, unfortunately, is a game I can not with good conscience say anything positive about. It’s the first on the list so far to use automatic puzzle generation giving you a virtually infinite amount of puzzles, however, it does generate puzzles that have no logical clues to solve. It suffers all the errors of first generation automatic sudoku puzzle programs. The sounds are horrible and the ‘hip’ futurestic techno presentation doesn’t fit sudoku much at all. I couldn’t stand this game very long to see if it had any redeeming features. It commits every sin a sudoku game possibly can, including giving away solutions. It doesn’t even contain a system to allow you to write in numbers temporarily. Awful, awful sudoku game. This game is released in Europe as Sudokumaniacs; avoid that title as well. Overall, “I no want!” applies.

This is a re-release of Puzzle Series Vol. 3 localised for english speaking audiences. This version has an extra 100 puzzles, and an extra difficulty level called ‘Practice’. There are 10 practice, 80 easy, 190 medium, and 120 hard puzzles for you to solve in this one. As well, upon playing this, I was able to discover what the locked options in the japanese game were. It’s some kind of rank test that I assume opens up as you complete puzzles on the various difficulty levels. As I was just playing to evaluate, I haven’t completed enough puzzles to try any of the rank tests. Much of what I had to say for Puzzle Series Vol. 3 applies here. The amount of puzzles, although of high quality, simply isn’t worth the full price-tag, a definate bargain bin buy though. The european release is exactly the same as the US release with the only significant change being more languages.

Puzzle Series Vol. 9 - Sudoku 2 Deluxe continues in the same vein as it’s predecessor, expanding the puzzle count to 400 like the american release of the first game. I wasn’t able to tell if these are completely new puzzles or just a recollection of what was originally in the japanese game and the added english ones. My memory simply isn’t that good. The notable new features I found right away was the ability to create your own sudoku puzzles from scratch and 3 different save slots so that multiple members of the family can play on the same cart without disrupting eachother’s play. There’s also a wireless DS option that I assume allows you to share your puzzles with your friends. It might be a buy for the Sudoku puzzle obsessed.

Nampure 10,000 Mon is a japanese only DS sudoku game. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, but, it does have 10,000 very well done puzzles. I -do- believe they’re all hand done and not randomly generated, but, there are some that break the ‘rules’ of japanese puzzles. It may just be that’s a priviledge the author of the puzzles took. The few I picked at random to solve did seem to have logical clues and I was easily able to follow long chains of thought which indicates that these aren’t random puzzles. This is a must-get title if you ask me.

I couldn’t play this. The numbers aren’t there, just random pictures. It’s horribly cute, but, I could barely stand the using the pictures that I only played first two stages. I apologize for the crappy amount of information on this game. I just couldn’t get into it at all to even force myself to see what there was to the game. This is perhaps one of the more frustrating titles I’ve had the misfortune of forcing myself to evaluate. Please, offer pity to the kitten for this one.

Similar to Toon-doku in using pictures to replace numbers for its special mode. Its puzzles however are completely random and without logic. The theme is cute and if you can stand the puzzles, the storylines are amusing as well. I’m not completely as opposed to this game as I was with some of the others, but, it’s not really worth the money. It does feature a classic sudoku mode, but, my assumption is that it’s more of the same, just no cute storyline, no cute avatars, just crappy randomized puzzles. My opinion, let someone else buy it and borrow it.

Essential Sudoku DS is the next on the list. The thing that surprised me was the inclusion of picture logic puzzles, one of my latest addictions. The game includes 2000 puzzles in all and the ability to create your own puzzles, both sudoku and picture logic. The bad news? The sudoku puzzles suck, and so does trying to solve them. Its key benefits are that it actually allows you to use the stylus to draw the numbers, and you can add in notations for possible numbers. It’s just the puzzles are so horribly constructed and so improper that it’s a chore to solve the sudoku puzzles. That being said, the picture logic puzzles included make this game worth having. It should be called Essential Picture Logic.

Platinum Sudoku is a fun title, but, again, it loses a little on it’s Sudoku side. The puzzles are again random jumbles and aren’t properly designed, but, they’re not randomly generated on the fly; you’re given a set number of puzzles. However, this number is very, very, large. It offers an unlockable option of ‘20 million grids’. What this option holds I don’t really know, but, I make the assumption they had a computer generate 20 million + of these random grids that don’t look very good and play fairly bad and stocked it into the ds game. This one is more fun for it’s kakuro puzzles, which are limited in number. My enjoyment of these may be due to ignorance of the norm for kakuro puzzles though. I do have troubles finding clues and following chains of thought in this as well which suggests that the kakuro puzzles are similarly randomly generated and not done by hand. This is a bargain bin buy for sudoku fans.

Sudokuro is… by our friends that created the nightmare that is Sudoku Mania and Sudokumaniacs. It’s more of the same, awful, awful, awful. It has no notation, random puzzles that make no sense, and only one improvement; now instead of random clues they have pregenerated masks they apply and some of these masks result in a properly revealed cluing that is symmetrical in the style of japanese puzzles. Others are just wrong. “No want!”

Hello there. I’m Kohana. My kitty Trinkit suggested I give Lost in Blue for the Nintendo DS a try and since she’s always full of good suggestions I gave it a shot. She herself hasn’t had the chance to give it much of a shot so she bugged me to write an entry on it and here I am!

Lost in Blue is a survival simulation taking place on a remote island. Your character, a boy named Keith, is shipwrecked and you must try and keep him alive. To complicate things very shortly in you run into Skye. Through a brief mishap her glasses end up broken which is why she won’t be doing much. To successfully play the game you must keep both characters alive which means finding food, keeping their thirst quenched, and ensuring they get enough rest all while trying to find a way back to civilization. If you don’t keep up their needs their health starts to drop and if it’s depleted for either character it’s game over. Since Skye can’t see well she won’t move much outside your sheltered area. To get her to go anywhere, including out to get a drink, you must hold her hands and take her. She’s not completely dead weight though, if you bring her food and spices she can cook you food which is more filling than if you had just eaten it raw, not to mention there are plenty of items which must be first cooked before you can eat them.

At first most your time will be spent trying to find food as the basic stuff you find without tools isn’t very filling. Water thankfully isn’t too much of a major issue as there is a water source near your shelter. The only annoyance with water is that you need to take Skye out yourself to get her to drink or she’ll just dehydrate and start losing health. With some progress and exploration you’ll find certain items you can craft tools and upgrade your shelter. With new tools you’ll have an easier time getting filling food. And the shelter upgrades help you get better rest and more storage space. This frees up time so can get started working on the goal of the game exploring the island to hopefully find a way to get off and back to civilization.

The game can get quite repetitive as you’ll spend a lot of time doing the same things over and over to get food. With an upgraded shelter you can store some but it is never enough to keep you covered for too long. Moving Skye around is annoying and slow as Keith needs to help her over ever jump, lift her up for every ledge, and similarly help her down ledges. The animations are quite cute at first however when you need to take her long distances they can become quite annoying. On the plus side the game makes great use of the Nintendo DSs features giving a nice tactile, and for the most part intuitive, feel to many of the activities. For instance you brush the stylus back and forth over the ground to brush away or dig up dirt/sand when looking in the ground or digging up potatoes or other vegetables in the ground. To shake a tree you move the stylus back and forth over the tree. For fishing you use it to tap where you want to throw your spear.

All in all it is a pretty fun game. However this game is quite unique so it certainly appeals to a smaller niche of players. So if you have a friend who has it you probably want to try it out a bit before getting a copy for yourself.

Thanks for reading! I’ll probably write again as Trinkit can be very demanding. If you thought normal cats were demanding you have no idea about the super intelligent game playing ones! Though the free tech support is nice… Anyway thanks again.

I recently was introduced to this type of puzzle by stumbleupon when it lead me to this page. I played around with the puzzles on the site quite a bit. The puzzles on the site are quite difficulty for me though. So, I began to look around elsewhere and see what else I can found. Almost immediately I found a reference to the japanese version of Picross DS and soon after I found that there was a european release. So, after obtaining my copy, I found a horde of the puzzles I’ve become infatuated with. Not only that, but, you can easily create your own on the DS as well as share puzzles with your friends.

There’s also an online community on the Nintendo WFC that has released several packs of puzzles on the japanese version and are slowly releasing the same packs in the european version. I presume they stagger the releases in an attempt to prolong the life of the game. I feel that the friend puzzle sharing does quite a bit to extend the life of the game myself. Puzzle creation is extremely easy, allowing you to basically draw the image and then it does a bit of guess work in designing the puzzle for you then lets you fine-tune the results.

The gameplay is very simple, like sudoku and other related puzzles, it’s extremely easy in concept, but, difficult in practice. Anyone can pick it up and play, but, it does take a bit to get decent times, and don’t expect to win on WFC if you’re making lots of wild guesses. In the game you’re presented with a grid, and each row/column of the grid is labeled with a set of numbers. Each individual indicating a group of blocks that should be filled along that row or column. When there’s multiple numbers on a row/column, it simply means there’s that many blocks, then at least one space, then the next number of blocks and so on. The game does a splendid job of teaching you how to play via the easy puzzles.

I thoroughly enjoy the game and would recommend it as a buy to anyone that enjoys puzzle games. It’ll keep you occupied for quite sometime and is worth every penny. I’ve been playing for a few days now and still haven’t seen all the puzzles there are in the game.

There’s also two gameboy games and an SNES game, “Mario’s Picross”, “Mario’s Picross II”, and “Mario’s Super Picross”, only the first was released in North America.

Unrelated to the DS game there’s an assortment of online places to play as well, popular search terms on google would be Picross, Nonogram, and Picture Logic.

Touch The Dead is a House Of The Dead style shooter game for the Nintendo DS. I’ve only spent a small amount of time with it, however, if you’re a fan of the zombie shooter games, you’ll definately enjoy it. It’s not the pinnacle of horror-gaming, but, it did make me jump once or twice. The game is fairly difficult. Perhaps it’s just that kitten paws aren’t the most dexterous with a stylus. So you may have better luck than I did. I was only able to get to the middle of the 2nd stage. The zombies are extremely tough even when shooting them in the head it seems often you’re unable to kill them before they arrive and start eating at you. It’s still quite fun even if it does seem futile at times.

The gameplay’s fairly straight forward, shoot zombies, reload, shoot more zombies, choose a path, and repeat. The graphics are pretty good for a DS game and the sounds aren’t without their merits. This kitty just didn’t think they were anything exceptional.

I’ll definately be revisiting the game because I cut my time with the game a bit short. I’d decided after spending a few hours of waging war against the zombies on the second stage that I’d get more out of my time getting some more reviews of other games before I return to Touch The Dead to hone my skills. If the game was called “Touch The Mouse” I’m sure I’d be much better at it.